something old, nothing new, borrowed or blue

(this is a story i wrote once that is entirely true, but it is reposted here so if you read it then you don't have to read it again.)

well i think that life is trying to teach me a lesson or that's how it appears, but let me try that again...

i fell through the ceiling, but that makes it sounds like i was traveling upwards, so no i fell through the floor, but the floor was the ceiling. and don't get all like "whoa the floor IS the ceiling, man," because that is not the lesson i think life is trying to teach me. and to step further back into the story, these squirrels live in my eaves and that in and of itself is fitting because i determined a while back that squirrels were my spirit animal and have even been known to have said "i don't think i could live somewhere that squirrels don't," but i didn't mean it literally. but squirrels literally do live where i live and so i wanted to see what kind of a door squirrels use to come into my house and i was wondering if maybe they had a doormat that says "welcome squiends" or something clever like that because those seem to be in fashion and almost always with a goose who is wearing a bonnet and carrying a basket. i don't know why. but i never made it to the squirrel door because i knew what was happening a split second before it did happen and this is not the only known instance of my clairvoyance, sometimes i know what i will say even before i say it, but my right leg burst through years of old wood and plaster and many hues of paint and my left leg hesitated like wile e. coyote in the air for a second before following suit (and pardon me for just realizing that expression has to do with card games!) 

if you were in the kitchen, and i wish you were, because i like having company, you would have heard some tentative footsteps followed by nothing, because there is a noiseless vacuum that precedes any calamity. then the levy of ceiling, holding back the mass of me would have burst forth, peppering you with plaster, showering you with splinters, pelting you with years and years of accumulated paint and not unlike the fabled yellowstone eruption that blanketed the modern day bible belt with ash and pumice, there was grit and plaster and dust on every shelf, plate and appliance, and definitely unlike the fabled yellowstone eruption, two hairy and bloodied legs protruded from the smoldering caldera. 

i don't know how many of you have tried to extricate yourselves upward from a jagged hole of splinters and rusty nails and fiberglass insulation. and never mind the squirrel audience. i know that i didn't want to drag the rest of me down it, the hole i mean, because the ten feet of air beneath me scared me more than the scrapes, and it wasn't the added pressure from having that added air above me that concerned me because i generally tolerate being in the kitchen very well. in fact it is one of my favorite places to spend my time. and so i decided to go down there the conventional way, since i like being there so much and i didn't have a whole lot better to do at that very moment, but i had to climb out of the hole first. and what is really funny and what you don't usually think about when you're walking around in any upstairs anywhere is i had no idea what i was above, no idea which ceiling exactly i had fallen through, so one of my first thoughts after i had a chance to inspect my handy work was "huh, i thought i was closer to that wall."

now i have fallen more than my fair share and that is why i am supposed to learn a lesson, but i want to take a moment to tally for you the times i have fallen, but good. i fell in a manhole, the cover dropped out from under me. i fell off a chairlift, because the bar went up and i was little and i just got off. i fell off a balcony that i was trying to climb down because the railing came off. now i have fallen through the ceiling, because squirrels. the culprit each time is complacency, they all happened because i took something for granted, that what i was walking on was solid, that the railing wasn't rotten, that when your dad puts the bar up, it is ok to dismount. and, oh, i could extend my realization to so many other literal events in my life, but the real temptation for me is to think that all of my metaphorical falls are a result of my complacency, and at first glance that might seem to be true, but it isn't and it can't be, because there is just no way that every negative event that affects me is my own fault. that is too buddhist. 

so the first thing i did when i got into the kitchen was pick up two broken slats and a piece of plaster and a shard of wood and i nailed the wood to the wall in my studio and i nailed the plaster to wall in there too. and the shard of wood. and i painted a skull on the plaster and crossbones on the slats and wrote "fear complacency" on the shard. and that is my lesson, and the word fear might count as hyperbole, but i couldn't fit "beware complacency", though now i see i should have tried. you should always try.